Slowdown

A few months back, as the modern financial system was revealing itself to be a hyper-stimulated and under-funded wreck, some unfamiliar merchandise turned up in midtown, along with a pitch: “This might be just the thing for jittery Wall Street right now.” The merchandise was liquid—a six-pack of tall purple cans with the word “DRANK” printed beneath a drawing of what looked like a bottle of Robitussin, along with the slogan “Slow Your Roll.” To a hip-hop fan, if not to a banker, the allusion is obvious: purple drank is a kind of instant moonshine, originating in the Houston rap scene, and consisting primarily of cough syrup and 7UP. (Variations abound, some featuring Jolly Ranchers.) It’s a sedative, and therefore well suited to the slow, vaguely psychedelic Southern rap favored by artists like Lil Wayne, whose song “Me and My Drank” includes the lyrics “I’m a sip until I lean hard / Drink got me moving slower than a retard. . . . One more ounce will make me feel so great / Wait, now I can’t feel my face.”

If you think of Red Bull, with its glorified but dubious ingredient, taurine, as in some ways emblematic of the housing boom, then here, perhaps, was something grounding to take a day trader’s eye off the relentlessly correcting ticker. The canned version, which is billed as an “anti-energy drink” and an “extreme relaxation beverage,” will do nothing for your congestion; its active ingredients are melatonin, rose hips, and valerian root. (The homespun stuff works best with codeine and promethazine.) “Eight ounces really puts you to sleep,” a publicist said. Each can contains sixteen ounces: a Rip Van Winkle special. It tastes like a faintly carbonated grape Kool-Aid, with hints of Dimetapp.

Before a recent office party, a journalist, moonlighting, in the spirit of the business cycle, as a social scientist, devised an experiment to test the Drank. As a control, competitor beverages were selected from the swag cabinet: Borgnine’s Coffee Soda (as in Ernest) and Folonari Pink Pinot Grigio—upper and downer. A variety of office-related sobriety tests were assigned, with marks for both competence and style—from walking the line (an old standard), to using an eyelash curler (fine motor skills), to sending faxes (operating heavy machinery). Observations were made as well about the socio-emotional reactions of the human subjects, all of whom were female. We’ll call them Purple, Pink, and Brown, in accordance with the colors of liquid in their plastic lab cups.

“I’m drinking Barbie’s blood,” Pink said, dropping in a few ice cubes to dull the taste of her screw-top wine. (A bystander, sampling the pink Folonari, had described it as Manischewitz Lite.) Approaching the first test, she wore two-inch heels and strode purposefully back and forth, without wavering. “That’s a ten,” she said, with a social drinker’s overconfidence. “That’s the best I’ve ever done in my life.”

Brown, ordinarily a decaf drinker, faltered slightly and set the cup of coffee soda down. “I’m about to have a heart attack,” she said, shaking slightly.

“My heart has actually stopped, I think,” Purple said. She took only a few steps before retreating to a sofa—“My roll has ground to a halt”—where the deluxe eyelash curler (with spring) was waiting. Pink showed Brown, a curling novice, how it was done. “You just work your way up the lash,” she said, clamping, holding, and releasing with a steady right hand.

After two tests, results were inconclusive. Pink struggled with the fax machine as the ice in the Folonari melted and the alcohol took effect: she headed first for the printer, then dialled a wrong number, and eventually sent the pages upside down. Brown, now on high alert from the caffeine, aced it. “I’m letting mistakes happen,” Purple drawled, as two pages snagged and scanned together. “I don’t care.”

Pink, with her portion of the procedure completed, joined the office party, switching eventually to sangria; Brown straightened up her desk; and Purple impressed herself by sending BlackBerry pictures of the experiment to her boss’s e-mail account. If there was a lesson here about the relative merits of alternative-life-style beverages, it didn’t emerge until three hours and thirty-two ounces of Drank later, when Purple reported that she was “feeling some ‘d’ words—‘drowsy, dopey, dozy, dull’ ”—but that her judgment, far from being impaired, actually seemed improved. “I was on the Lands’ End Web site, and put a lab coat in my shopping cart—it was on sale, marked down from thirty-five dollars to nine-ninety-nine—but then didn’t complete the purchase,” she said. Not a rap fan, she’d been listening to what she called “mid-tempo soul,” and by 9 P.M., having since moved on to Circuit City’s Web site (flat-screen TVs), she was napping. No money spent. Who knew that “capturing the laid-back culture of hip hop,” as a Drank press release puts it, was a lesson in consumer restraint?